A TELECONFERENCING SYSTEM CAPABLE OF MULTIPLE PERSON EYE CONTACT (MPEC) USING HALF MIRRORS AND CAMERAS PLACED AT COMMON POINTS OF EXTENDED LINES OF GAZE
Lc. Desilva et al., A TELECONFERENCING SYSTEM CAPABLE OF MULTIPLE PERSON EYE CONTACT (MPEC) USING HALF MIRRORS AND CAMERAS PLACED AT COMMON POINTS OF EXTENDED LINES OF GAZE, IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology, 5(4), 1995, pp. 268-277
In this paper a novel method of providing eye contact for multiple par
ticipants in a teleconferencing system is presented, This method propo
ses a simple idea to fulfill the requirement for eye contact, for two
or more local and remote participants simultaneously, by using half mi
rrors and cameras placed at the common points of the extended lines of
gaze of each participant, In contrast to the commonly available one t
o one eye contact video phone systems, which also use half mirrors, th
e proposed system has the advantage of serving more than one person at
a given location, hence named Multiple Person Eye Contact (MPEC) tele
conferencing system, We observed the resultant images by using a preli
minary experiment and also building a prototype system, The results fr
om both of these experiments proved the merits of the proposed idea. O
ne of the main features of this system is that, it gives any participa
nt, a feeling of ''being looked at'' if any remote participant is actu
ally gazing at him, On the other hand if none of the remote participan
ts are looking at him, then he gets the feeling of ''not being looked
at,'' which is also extremely important for effective inter personal c
ommunication, Furthermore, this system preserves the spatial continuit
y of neighboring participants, since all the participants at a given l
ocation are captured by each,ideo camera.